[gha] Re: GREAT NEWS. UN votes to outlaw nuclear weapons in 2017

From: "Martin, Glen" <gmartin@xxxxxxxxxxx>

To: "gha@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <gha@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2016 15:15:05 +0000

Dear friends and colleagues,

As a person living in the single nation that sees itself as an exception to all
international laws and to “moral” pressure from the rest of humanity, I want to
suggest that the abolition of nuclear weapons will never happen until we have
real, enforceable world law under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Until the people who requisition them, who design them, who build them, who
transport them, and who deploy them are subject to arrest and criminal
prosecution, the abolition of nuclear weapons will simply not happen.
President Obama has just signed on to a one trillion dollar upgrade in the US
nuclear weapons arsenal.

NEW YORK – The United Nations today adopted a landmark resolution to launch
negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. This historic
decision heralds an end to two decades of paralysis in multilateral nuclear
disarmament efforts.

At a meeting of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, which deals
with disarmament and international security matters, 123 nations voted in
favour of the resolution, with 38 against and 16 abstaining.

The resolution will set up a UN conference beginning in March next year, open
to all member states, to negotiate a “legally binding instrument to prohibit
nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”. The negotiations
will continue in June and July.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a civil society
coalition active in 100 countries, hailed the adoption of the resolution as a
major step forward, marking a fundamental shift in the way that the world
tackles this paramount threat.

“For seven decades, the UN has warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and
people globally have campaigned for their abolition. Today the majority of
states finally resolved to outlaw these weapons,” said Beatrice Fihn, executive
director of ICAN.

Despite arm-twisting by a number of nuclear-armed states, the resolution was
adopted in a landslide. A total of 57 nations were co-sponsors, with Austria,
Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa taking the lead in drafting
the resolution.

The UN vote came just hours after the European Parliament adopted its own
resolution on this subject – 415 in favour and 124 against, with 74 abstentions
– inviting European Union member states to “participate constructively” in next
year’s negotiations.

Nuclear weapons remain the only weapons of mass destruction not yet outlawed in
a comprehensive and universal manner, despite their well-documented
catastrophic humanitarian and environmental impacts.

“A treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons would strengthen the global norm against
the use and possession of these weapons, closing major loopholes in the
existing international legal regime and spurring long-overdue action on
disarmament,” said Fihn.

“Today’s vote demonstrates very clearly that a majority of the world’s nations
consider the prohibition of nuclear weapons to be necessary, feasible and
urgent. They view it as the most viable option for achieving real progress on
disarmament,” she said.

Biological weapons, chemical weapons, anti-personnel landmines and cluster
munitions are all explicitly prohibited under international law. But only
partial prohibitions currently exist for nuclear weapons.

Nuclear disarmament has been high on the UN agenda since the organization’s
formation in 1945. Efforts to advance this goal have stalled in recent years,
with nuclear-armed nations investing heavily in the modernization of their
nuclear forces.

Twenty years have passed since a multilateral nuclear disarmament instrument
was last negotiated: the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which has
yet to enter into legal force due to the opposition of a handful of nations.

Today’s resolution, known as L.41, acts upon the key recommendation of a UN
working group on nuclear disarmament that met in Geneva this year to assess the
merits of various proposals for achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world.

It also follows three major intergovernmental conferences examining the
humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, held in Norway, Mexico and Austria in
2013 and 2014. These gatherings helped reframe the nuclear weapons debate to
focus on the harm that such weapons inflict on people.

The conferences also enabled non-nuclear-armed nations to play a more assertive
role in the disarmament arena. By the third and final conference, which took
place in Vienna in December 2014, most governments had signalled their desire
to outlaw nuclear weapons.

Following the Vienna conference, ICAN was instrumental in garnering support for
a 127-nation diplomatic pledge, known as the humanitarian pledge, committing
governments to cooperate in efforts “to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate
nuclear weapons”.

Throughout this process, victims and survivors of nuclear weapon detonations,
including nuclear testing, have contributed actively. Setsuko Thurlow, a
survivor of the Hiroshima bombing and an ICAN supporter, has been a leading
proponent of a ban.

“This is a truly historic moment for the entire world,” she said following
today’s vote. “For those of us who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, it is a very joyous occasion. We have been waiting so long for
this day to come.”

“Nuclear weapons are absolutely abhorrent. All nations should participate in
the negotiations next year to outlaw them. I hope to be there myself to remind
delegates of the unspeakable suffering that nuclear weapons cause. It is all of
our responsibility to make sure that such suffering never happens again.”

There are still more than 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, mostly in
the arsenals of just two nations: the United States and Russia. Seven other
nations possess nuclear weapons: Britain, France, China, Israel, India,
Pakistan and North Korea.

Most of the nine nuclear-armed nations voted against the UN resolution. Many of
their allies, including those in Europe that host nuclear weapons on their
territory as part of a NATO arrangement, also failed to support the resolution.

But the nations of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the
Pacific voted overwhelmingly in favour of the resolution, and are likely to be
key players at the negotiating conference in New York next year.

On Monday, 15 Nobel Peace Prize winners urged nations to support the
negotiations and to bring them “to a timely and successful conclusion so that
we can proceed rapidly toward the final elimination of this existential threat
to humanity”.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has also appealed to governments
to support this process, stating on 12 October that the international community
has a “unique opportunity” to achieve a ban on the “most destructive weapon
ever invented”.

In particular, the treaty will place great pressure on nations that claim
protection from an ally’s nuclear weapons to end this practice, which in turn
will create pressure for disarmament action by the nuclear-armed nations.